Neville Chamberlain’s War

Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, the arch-appeaser of 1938, waged the only war he could manage: a war of appeasement. It was phoney from the start, and that is just what he intended. He did not seek the defeat of Germany, since the British establishment considered that country to be the prime bulwark against Bolshevism in Europe. He assumed that the fully mobilized French army, which Churchill had pronounced the finest in the world, would convince the good German people that they could not possibly win. Once they felt the pressure of a British naval blockade, they would gladly replace Hitler with a government amenable to Britain.
Chamberlain had tried mightily to avoid a war with Germany. His hastily-conceived guarantee to Poland was meant to deter Hitler from starting one. Instead, the Phoney War resulted in Hitler’s greatest triumph, the conquest of Western, democratic Europe, whose industrial and agricultural resources allowed Nazi Germany to pursue its aggression against the Soviet Union. As an island, Britain survived the defeat of 1940 and eventually emerged on the side of the victors. This thoroughly researched history tells the entire story of Chamberlain’s Phoney War, and carries an important lesson: any power that goes to war without weighing its chances of victory is courting disaster.

Frederic Seager is a Canadian historian, now retired from active teaching at the Université de Montréal. His research has been focused primarily on Franco-German relations and on the two World Wars.

Frederic Seager
Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages:
Bibliographic Info: notes, bibliography, index
Copyright Date: 2025
pISBN: 978-1-4766-9848-9
eISBN: 978-1-4766-5622-9
Imprint: McFarland

• “This book is a work of meticulous and extensive research that uncovers the role Neville Chamberlain played in the historical disaster that was the Phoney War. The author illustrates how this fragment of history has been distorted by historians and why. Beautiful prose.”—The Book Commentary

• “Intensely detailed, and never dull, this is a revealing, well-documented narrative that explores all layers of a past gone by. Highly recommended.”—The Prairies Book Review

• “Seager’s narrative is captivating in large part because he doesn’t shy away from strong critiques of British and French leadership—including his assertion that Chamberlain (and Churchill, to some extent) advocated a wait-and-see policy based on the false assumption that French troops would never fall to a German invasion.”—BookLife

• “Seager provides an engaging window into an underexplored time frame and convincingly argues that this period of the war still has much to teach people. An illuminating look into the early days and strategies of World War II.”—Kirkus Reviews

• “A fascinating and provocative look at the early days of World War II known as the Phoney War. Seager makes a convincing case for Neville Chamberlain’s leadership during the period as a catastrophic failure.”—The Bookbag

• “5 out of 5 stars. What price did Britain pay for its ‘phoney war’? Find out in this intriguing book.”—The Online Book Club